Tom Cruise recalls hiding his broken foot in order to film a Mission: Impossible II stunt that the studio spent months trying to cancel. Released in 2000 and directed by John Woo, the follow-up to 1996's Mission: Impossible features Cruise back as superspy Ethan Hunt, this time fighting terrorists to recover a deadly virus. The sequel features a handful of standout action sequences and stunts, including the movie's opening, which features Cruise scaling the side of a mountain and making a death-defying leap from one cliff face to another.

During a recent interview with Empire magazine ahead of the release of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in May, Cruise looks back at his Mission: Impossible 2 cliff stunt, revealing that he was sporting a broken foot as he did it. According to the star, . Cruise, however, pushed forward anyway, and ended up pulling it off despite his injury. Check out Cruise's recollection of events below:

"I wanted to do a climbing sequence. Throughout filming in Australia, there were weather challenges. It rained for 40 days. I felt like Noah. And the studio was like, 'Listen, because of the rain, and [because] the schedule is over, let's find another opening to the movie.' Every day people were coming in with different pitches. I was like, 'I don't know how else to open the movie.'

So, now we're into the winter months in Moab, I've flown all the way from Australia, and there are gale force winds. So we can't even have my crew up on the mountain. I have pushed the studio for the opening of this movie, and you can't even get there to set up the camera. I am so exhausted from jet lag, and I don't know how to call the studio, and I'm not shooting, and you feel the pressure of shooting something, and for six months they've been wanting me to change the opening sequence.

And what happened is, I remember waking up the next day, and I was just like, 'You have to confront this. And the sun was coming up, and the wind was gone, and the temperatures had come up. So I was like, 'Let's get to the top of the mountain and just start shooting it now?'

This is back in the days where you didn't have radios, and I'm free climbing as I'm going up to where I need to be for that opening shot. I had to pace myself, because I had to climb down afterwards, and if I fall, there's a cable that's going to get me, but I'm going to be slamming up against the mountain. And the rock is very soft rock. At certain times you're going, 'Jesus, I'm sliding, it's breaking away.' As I'm doing the Iron Cross (a move where he is suspended between two pieces of rock), I'm actually hanging there, but it isn't quite right, and you can see it. I was like, 'Just tell me this is the shot, because I can't do it again.'

What people don't know is that there's a section where I'm jumping high to low, but my foot was broken. And I never mentioned it to anyone. Some of these injuries, what's the point? You just keep going. So I'm jumping, and my foot wasn't right. John Woo was like, 'We've got the shot.' I was like, 'No, we want it in one shot, I gotta keep doing it.' And that's the shot that's in the movie. But it was so much fun working with John, doing that sequence, because I knew it was our [marketing] campaign."

It was with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in 2011 that each new movie in the franchise became built around one or two big stunt sequences. Cruise's story, however, highlights how his desire for standout Mission: Impossible stunt sequences had been around for much longer. The first film featured the memorable stunt of Cruise dangling from wires while breaking into a CIA vault, but the second movie ups the ante, with the cliff stunt being far more dangerous.

The cliff stunt in Mission: Impossible 2 is also not the only dangerous stunt in the movie. Towards the film's climax, there's a scene in which a knife is held less than an inch away from Cruise's eye, which was accomplished by attaching the knife to a steel cable. , and this is now set to culminate with the upcoming Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which features a deadly underwater stunt as well as a sequence involving a biplane.

Cruise accomplishing the cliff stunt with a broken foot mirrors a similar situation he experienced while filming Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018). While jumping between two buildings, the actor broke his ankle upon impact, but he still pulled himself up on the other side and hobbled out of frame past the camera. Clearly, , and he often does this at the expense of his own health and safety.

Unfortunately, Woo's 2000 sequel is widely considered the worst Mission: Impossible movie. Despite the stunts, the movie falls short when it comes to story, and it lacks the momentum that has come to define later films. Still, the cliff opening remains a franchise highlight, and Cruise's latest story about filming the sequence is sure to only make it more fun to revisit.

Source: Empire